Notes

1. Keeping in touch

One way is to call people up or write them a friendly note every so
often. I find this difficult to do because I'm still not used to small
talk. I'm also not used to being interrupted for a purely social call
unless it's someone I know well. I'm much more comfortable dealing
with information. I want to be useful.

First, I need to keep track of people's interests. When I run across
something that might be useful for them, I can send them the
information. If I also keep track of other little facts I know about
people, then I can make them feel a little more special.

Second, I should regularly refresh my contacts. I should make sure I
keep in touch with people. Maybe I should set goals for how often I
should get in touch with different kinds of people. There are people I
don't expect further contact with, there are people I should write at
least once a year, and there are people I'd like to correspond with
more frequently.

The next step would be to proactively search for useful information.
If I periodically read about other people's interests, I will not only
learn many new things and gain more common ground with them, but might
also find resources they haven't run across before.

WHAT I CURRENTLY HAVE:

I already keep notes on people in my BBDB (Big Brother Database,
Emacs). BBDB makes it easy for me to associate notes with e-mail.
Whenever I read a message from someone in my address book, the BBDB
record pops up and I can review or add notes easily.

However, I don't regularly review these contacts or make a conscious
effort to stay in touch with a wide range of people. I tend to react
instead of act, and I'd like to change that.

WHAT I'D LIKE TO HAVE:

I would like to be able to see my contacts grouped by relative
frequency. This would allow me to flip through, say, all the people I
have yet to contact this year, and randomly pick people to get in
touch with. I need to also keep track of our last few communications,
in terms of both when I got in touch with that person and when I got a
reply.

I would like to be able to see my contacts grouped by interest. I can
achieve the same effect by searching through the records for a
particular keyword. This would allow me to easily look up all the
people I should get in touch with regarding a particular topic.

I would like to be able to create tasks based on each contact or group
of contacts. I should be able to list all the tasks associated with a
particular person as well as see the tasks on my day page, perhaps
under the "social" context.

WHAT I CAN DO:

First, I should add two fields to my BBDB records to keep track of the
last time I spoke/wrote to the person and the last time I received a
reply. I can probably configure Gnus to update this automatically for
mail, although I can also do that myself. I can also add an entry for
maximum days without contact, or something like that.

I can add another field called "Next action", which keeps track of the
next thing I can do for that person.

I can write Emacs Lisp code to extract all the relevant information
from BBDB and prioritize the list.

2. BBDB tags

Right, that tags thing looks like a good idea. It should be easy to
hack into BBDB. I'll need to actually tag people, and then write an
Emacs Lisp script that scans through all of the records, gathers them
into categories, and then creates the list.

Use C-o to add a "tags" field to your BBDB records. This should be a space-delimited list of tags (case-sensitive for now).
Call M-x sacha/planner-bbdb-insert-tags-alist to produce a list like the one above.

Revolutionize computer science education by making it highly
individualized and experiential.

Become a world-famous expert on creating systems for planning one's
life. Instead of pushing a particular methodology, I'd like to work
with people's current ways of planning, suggesting improvements and
software/hardware to support their life.

Fortune

DOS: n., A small annoying boot virus that causes random spontaneous system
crashes, usually just before saving a massive project. Easily cured by
UNIX. See also MS-DOS, IBM-DOS, DR-DOS.
(from David Vicker's .plan)